Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, would like to make a contribution to honour and respect the passing of Edward Gough Whitlam AC, QC, member of the House of Representatives for the division of Werriwa New South Wales from 1952 to 1978, and Prime Minister of this great country from 1972 to 1975—our 21st Prime Minister.

Many have paid their respects—from the Prime Minister, who I thought gave a respectful speech in the other place, to the Leader of the Opposition—but Senator John Faulkner yet again spoke in this chamber about this relationship with Gough and encompassed, so eloquently, not only Gough's great vision and passion for this country but also his endearing love for his wife, his family, his political party and his country.

It would be remiss of me if I did not at least highlight some of the great reforms that Gough was largely responsible for. We know that the Labor Party had been out of government for 23 years. For us who are fortunate enough to stand in this place it is very hard to imagine that. We hope most sincerely that we never have to stay out of government for anywhere near that long. But the Labor Party had to be modernised at that time. It needed someone to come along and show great vision and wisdom and to have the motivation to tackle the challenges within the Labor Party at that time to develop policies so that we were able, in 1972, to go to an election with the policies that the Australian people were willing to support.

It was not an easy transition because, as we all know, the Australian Labor Party, has been a party for well in excess of 100 years. With that comes a lot of tradition, and it took a great deal of encouragement and coercion to get people at that time to see that there needed to be real change to the Labor Party. But Gough Whitlam, along with others, was able to achieve those changes.

We also know—and it has been mentioned by other senators today—the enormous contribution that Gough Whitlam made to our Indigenous people. He also made a huge difference to this country in instigating well-known and well-supported universal health care, which later became Medibank. We also note the change that was brought about in this country to enable people to go to university. For many families, the 1970s was the first time that someone from their family was able to go to university. But particularly it was so important for women of this country to be able to attend university. Senator Milne spoke in her contribution this morning about the impact being able to attend university had on her, and she said that she entered teaching because that provided more support for her family. So many of us in this chamber have been personally impacted not only by being able to go to university but in being able to say that we were motivated and inspired by Gough Whitlam to become politically active.

I was only a young girl in 1972—though probably not as young as I would like to have been!—and my family were on the cusp of being affected by the Vietnam War because my brother was due to go into the draw for service in Vietnam. Many people in my community, including my neighbours' sons, were sent off to Vietnam. Whitlam coming into power and changing that had an enormous impact on our communities and on us as a family and as individuals.

The creation of Medibank, the precursor to Medicare, was so important—and we are still fighting to this very day under this government to ensure that universal health care is still part of the fabric of Australia's society. In the area of equal pay for women, the first act of the Whitlam government was to reopen the national wage and equal pay cases at the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. The 1972 equal pay case held that Australian women doing work similar to that of men should be paid an equal wage. Two years later, the commission extended the adult minimum wage to include women workers for the very first time. Mr Whitlam also instigated paid maternity leave for women working in the Public Service.

We know that his vision, his wisdom and his passion for all Australians and for those who were less well-off in our community saw the creation of an Australian Legal Aid Office and the setting up of the Australian Law Reform Commission. This led to significant law reform in a range of issues that Whitlam saw as absolutely critical to the social justice outcomes of this country. He and his government were also responsible for the abolition of the death penalty in this country. As we know, the Family Law Act, providing for a national Family Court, was enacted, and simplified, non-punitive divorce laws were introduced. These were real policies that would impact on Australian families.

We saw the Whitlam government also establish needs based funding for our schools after appointing Peter Karmel to head a committee examining the position of government and non-government primary and secondary schools throughout Australia. Karmel's report identified many inequities in the funding scheme, which, for the first time, led to the federal government providing funding to state schools. As I said, a free university education was briefly available to all Australians. In Whitlam's three years of government, participation in higher education increased by 25 per cent, with 276,559 enrolments. As I said earlier, the main benefactors of that were women.

We know that all governments make mistakes, but, overwhelmingly, the Whitlam government was a government of vision. It was prepared to tackle issues that no government before it was able to address. As mentioned by my good Senate colleagues today, the impact of the National Sewerage Program and of the connection of homes to sewerage in places like Western Sydney is hard to imagine now, in 2014, but these were big issues that affected people of low income. It was the Whitlam government that reduced the voting age to 18, where previously it had been 21, and provided the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory with representation in the Senate.

It might have been—and I often think so—that my high school, Deloraine High School in Deloraine, Tasmania, was ahead of its time, but there is one circumstance where I think it shone out above most others in Tasmania. We sang Advance Australia Fair, as well as God Save the Queen, before the Whitlam government made Advance Australia Fair our national anthem, a move I agreed with. At that time, I think it inspired me to start thinking about where I saw Australia going forward in the world—and I certainly felt that our future should see us become a republic. Unfortunately, so many decades later, we still have not achieved that goal, but another step on that path was when Gough removed the British honours system and installed the Order of Australia, which I think was so much more fitting for the Australian community. Today, it is like we have gone back in time, because we now have seen that system reintroduced by the current government.

Among the most significant social reform that has had the widest impact on our community was the reform that provided benefits to mothers and widows, and single mums in particular. This addressed the stigma attached to young women who had children on their own or who, through various reasons, were forced to raise their children alone and saw them given the assistance that they needed.

We can talk about all the great reforms. There were so many more if you talk about things like Papua New Guinea becoming independent on 16 September 1975 after being administrated by Australia since the First World War, and before that it was a German colony. Whitlam knew that Australia's colonial control of this country was outdated. He also was a man ahead of his time when he chose to engage with China. This is certainly another example of his vision in wanting to ensure that Australia was able to participate on the global stage, not being afraid and not staying with the things that we have known of old. He was prepared to go that one step further.

If we go back to 1969, the election that we almost won at that time was a game changer for me. It was actually the year that I joined the Australian Labor Party. I was but a wee child in those times! It was a time when the Labor Party was preparing itself and starting to get policies ready to ensure that we could take that next step, from opposition after all those long years, to form government. The lead-up to the election of 1972 had an enormous impact on me, my brother and my family. My mother was always a Labor person. She always espoused the necessity to be a member of your relevant union, to be respectful and to work hard, and that the world was at your feet if you were prepared to work hard. My father was a conservative and came from very much a rural background and, indeed, a considerably conservative family. But, leading up to the 1972 election, my father, along with so many others and their families—we used to talk about this around the kitchen table because we did not have a television in those days—used to sit around, play cards, have dinner and talk about politics and what was happening the community. My father became a believer. The 'It's Time' campaign was very exciting. I can remember the T-shirts I wore, the energy that was in our community and the hope for Australia. I have felt that a number of times in the lead-up to federal and state elections, but no others left such a meaningful mark on me and on my personality.

In terms of Gough and his vision, the thing that struck me was: first and foremost, he was about equality. This man inspired me as a young girl in forming my beliefs, my standards, my morals and my vision for what I wanted to do when I was an adult. He inspired me because he was about equality, fairness and giving women opportunities. He also inspired my older brother, who was elected before Whitlam changed the voting age. When he was elected to state parliament, he was 21 and that was still the voting age. We have a very personal story.

But, as we transitioned from 1972, when I was in high school, there was another person who inspired me: my social science teacher, Mr Gillespie. He had been teaching in the United States and had come back. He was passionate about politics. He was passionate about what was happening during that 1972-75 period. When we were studying the Australian political system, we had a role-play of parliament—much like what happens here through the Parliamentary Education Office. Unfortunately, we did not have all the materials provided to us, so we had to do research. As you can imagine, it was a lot more difficult with our computers than it is now. I was given a huge responsibility in that role-play. We sat in parliament for over three days in that social science class, and I, of course, was none other than Gough Whitlam. He left an everlasting imprint on me and my active participation in politics and within my community.

The other person associated with Gough Whitlam during that 1972-75 period was the late the Hon. Lance Barnard, whom I was fortunate enough to know very well over a long period of time. In two other places of employment, he shared an office, so we would quite often sit around and have a cup of coffee and hear the stories. As has been noted on numerous occasions, it was in the first week of forming government in 1972 that all the portfolios were shared between Gough Whitlam and Lance Barnard. Those two men never forgot where they came from. It is a very good life lesson: they never forgot where they came from. They were great men of the Australian Labor Party. They always put other people first. Once they had left public office, as far as being elected representatives in the other place, they still participated in the Australian Labor Party. They were still available to assist where they could in the community. It goes without saying that Gough and Margaret Whitlam were a couple that enjoyed decade after decade of marriage, raised their four children and were able to celebrate having grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They were a great couple within the Australian Labor Party and a significant part of our wider Australian community.

I will talk for a moment about Margaret Whitlam and her contribution. One of her still redeeming features was that she was a woman who was prepared to speak out on a whole range of issues. She was as intelligent and as passionate about her views as Gough himself was. She established the Australian Labor Party Sisterhood in this country, and the only group still meeting and in existence is in Launceston in Tasmania, my home state and my home city. The thing that inspired me about Margaret Whitlam was that when she worked to support and develop the sisterhood she envisaged that that organisation, that grouping within the Labor Party, would be one that would embrace all women—to help educate them, to help them gain the skills to run for public office—and that they would raise money to assist women, irrespective of their views. If you were a member of the Australian Labor, you could—as you still can in Tasmania—be a member of ALPS, unlike the modern groups that exist for women in the Labor Party currently.

We have all spoken this morning and since the passing of Gough Whitlam about his legacy. I think the legacy of decency, of equality, of passion, of vision and of fairness were some of the greatest contributions he made to this country. I believe he also inspired a generation of activists. There are so many people I could mention—Michael Field, Michael Aird, Terry Aulich, Michael Polley, and the list goes on and on—who were inspired to enter into public life, whether it was at a federal level or a state level. I too join with my colleagues in passing on my condolences, my thoughts and my prayers for his four children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren, as well as the extended family. Although we all grieve as members of this chamber, of the Australian Labor Party and of the greater Australian community, his family can be so very proud of both their mother and their father in terms of what they gave to the Australian community and the Australian Labor Party. want to thank them for sharing their parents and for allowing us—and I was fortunate enough to meet Margaret and Gough on numerous occasions—to share with them our sorrow at the passing of Gough last week.

We have had many journalists write about Gough Whitlam and whether when someone passes away we think only about the good things. Of course, like every human being, Gough Whitlam had his flaws. We all do. But people have asked me, 'Why is it that he has left such a mark on our community?' I think it is because he was a man who, when he spoke to the Australian community, spoke to every man and every woman in this country and because he knew that we could aspire to be so much more than what we had been as a country in the 1950s and the 1960s. He had vision for the future. He wanted us to break away from being just a colony of the United Kingdom. He was a man who wanted to ensure that Australia's future was bright and that we were prosperous.

So, vale to you, Gough Whitlam. Thank you for inspiring me and so many others to become political activists. You will be long remembered as a giant of a man within Australia and within our hearts.